Baguio News

Baguio City, as the cultural, commercial and administrative center of the Cordillera Region in the Philippines, and trying to "live up" to its highly urbanized city classification, is a hive of activity.

Baguio is also the location of the official summer residence of the President of the Philippines (The Mansion), from which a lot of national news and official government pronouncements emanate while the President is in residence. The Summer Capital of the Philippines is considered one of the major Philippine cities, a place closest and dearest to the hearts of a lot of Filipinos who are always interested in what's happening in this mountain resort town.

Here then are the top news headlines for the region to give you a better idea of what's happening in the City of Pines.

Apart from it being one of the Philippines' major cities, Baguio is also the seat of the Cordillera Administrative Region, the news desks of the major daily news-papers send stories and photos about the WHOLE region from Summer Capital of the Philippines.

And this is news from a really large land area totalling 20,335.9 square kilometers (the City of Pines comprises a tiny 57.5 square kilometers or a mere 0.28% of the whole).

So every little accident, minor landslide, or petty crime in the Cordilleras, even if the incident occured some 300km away, is datelined "Baguio City." Reading the papers, one would think our laid-back little town is disaster-prone and crime-ridden, which is of course the complete opposite.

Residents and city officials will argue that ours is a "highly urbanized city" but that is just a technical definition the Philippine government in 1978 used to classified the city as such (regardless of land area, population size or income) in order to secure for it a larger share in national taxes in aid of tourism.

In my opinion, it is highly urbanized in terms of the existence of concrete and glass buildings and the availability of basic utilities such as electricity, indoor plumbing, internet access and all the comforts of modern life. In recent years, we have added large malls, too!

But based on attitude, Baguio remains a small town, where everybody knows everybody, where the pace is relaxed and life can still be oh, so graceful. And since it is a small town, any news is big news!

Benguet and other places in the Cordillera region are a major source of highland vegetables that is delivered to the rest of

the Philippines. But people believe that the vegetables come from Baguio because they are sold in large volumes at the public market. When vegetable prices go up, or crops are affected by the weather, the news is usually datelined "Baguio."